Many years ago, a man from Illinois descended the steps of the United States Capitol to deliver a speech just like Barack Obama will give on Tuesday. The day had been cold and overcast. As he stepped to the small table that would serve as his “pulpit,” the sun broke through as if the heavens were signaling their approval. After a wave of applause, the crowd fell into solemn silence. On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. After only 702 words, roughly as many as are in this column, he sat down — having completed what many historians believe is the greatest speech ever delivered by an American.
I am something of a presidential history junkie. I quizzed a bunch of my friends the other night, “Can anyone remember anything a president ever said in an inaugural speech?” Though they had a few wrong answers, ultimately they only remembered one: John F. Kennedy’s famous, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
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Fortunately, President-elect Obama is aware of the tradition of inaugural forget-ability. He also has carefully studied Lincoln’s second inaugural. This is good news for the country — not, as he has joked, because it is so brief, but because the principles that Lincoln espoused transcend time and political partisanship.
As a weary nation anticipated the end of its most painful trial — a war not with a foreign power but with each other — Lincoln reminded those still in the midst of the Civil War that “both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”
In the political rancor of Washington, then as now, both sides sought to claim the moral high ground as if it was their sole domain. Even as he decried that evil of slavery, Lincoln’s humility shone through. He said, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us ‘judge not, that we be not judged.’ ”
In this, he quoted from his well-worn Bible, which he had opened to this passage (Matthew 7:1), when he placed his hand on the sacred words as he again took his oath of office. He used the majority of his speech to caution his countrymen that a nation that oppresses its own people based on the color of their skin is worthy of God’s righteous judgment. He believed that the Civil War was God’s means of repaying our nation for the sin of slavery.
Lincoln concluded his speech with a memorable call for reconciliation:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
The London Spectator commented, “We cannot read [the speech] without a renewed conviction that it is the noblest political document known to history. …”
We often hear that the inauguration of our new president will take place in the midst of “unprecedented security.” Sadly, this is necessary because the evil of Lincoln’s day is still a part of life for too many Americans. In the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who we also remember this weekend, we have not reached the place where our children can “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a few yards from where Lincoln’s second inaugural address is etched in marble for all to remember. We pray that God would give our new president the wisdom and humility of Lincoln — and King’s passion for freedom — as he assumes the highest office in the nation that we love.
